Chapter 8: Managing Printers and Controlling Processes

Overview

SOLARIS 9 EXAM OBJECTIVES COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Describe the purpose, features, and functionality of printer fundamentals, including print management tools, printer configuration types, Solaris LP print service, LP print service directory structure, and the Solaris OE printing process.

• Explain how to configure printer classes, set the default printer, change the default printer class, remove a printer's configuration, start the LP print service, and stop the LP print service using the appropriate commands.

• Given a scenario, identify the appropriate commands to specify a destination printer, accept and reject print jobs, enable and disable printers, and move print jobs.

• Explain how to view system processes, clear hung processes, schedule an automatic one-time execution of a command and the automatic recurring execution of a command.

Printing is something most people do on a daily basis. Whether it's printing a report at work or e-mails at home, using a printer is probably a significant part of your computing experience. When it comes to networking computers, printing takes on even more importance. Networking is all about sharing resources, and printers are the most commonly shared hardware resource.

This chapter starts by discussing printing terminology and printing fundamentals. Even though you probably print regularly, you might not know what goes on behind the scenes or the proper terms for printing components. After you examine the essentials, you will move on to installing and managing printers in a Solaris environment. Our printing discussion will conclude with troubleshooting tips.

Printing is one of the most common processes regularly started and stopped on computers, and this chapter also covers processes in detail. Many people think of processes as just applications, but there's much more to processes than what you see running on your computer. You will learn what a process is, how to manage processes, and how to deal with misbehaving processes. Processes can be conveniently scheduled to run automatically, and this chapter discusses that as well.